


An Old White Horse Galloped Away...

by Tammany



Series: The Sussex Downs [21]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Change and adaptation, Cosmology and theology (minor), Gen, M/M, Married Couple, Old Marrieds, Personal Growth, married conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-29
Updated: 2019-09-29
Packaged: 2020-11-01 11:47:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20814632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: The title is taken from T.S. Eliot's "The Journey of the Magi."I think many of you will like this little, quiet interlude with Mycroft and Greg reassessing their lives a bit, and Greg in particular trying to reach his own truce with how things are changing around him.I apologize to those of you who could do without repeated brushes with humans contemplating the divine. I feel your pain. But at rock bottom I can't think of anything more certain to disrupt a modern human's life and sanity than proof that there's a supernatural world, and strong evidence that there's a God...without enough evidence to know if s/he is really a good being, or a monster. Not for sure. Thanks to that "ineffable" stuff.The majority of it, though, is relationship, and domestic chatter, and two old marrieds worrying about their family--and loving each other through all of it.





	An Old White Horse Galloped Away...

Greg had made Mycroft purchase a hybrid hatchback, rather than the monster SUV he’d have preferred to drive. “Not much of an advocate for climate repair driving around in a carbon-shittin’ monster like that,” he’d pointed out, grinning. “This will do us fine. If we need to fetch something big, we’ll make arrangements. But this will bring in a week of groceries, and that’s plenty.”

“You don’t want us to buy bulk and prepare for end-times?” Mycroft asked, with gentle, amused acid. “A year or more hoarded, for times of famine?”

“We’ll grow our own,” Greg said, laughter in his eyes. “Crowley can teach us to garden, and we’ll keep chickens and goats.”

“Cows,” Mycroft said, firmly. “Jerseys or Dexters. Something small and versatile.”

“I notice you also are inclined to milk with high fat content.”

“If we must suffer the end of days, do we want to give up cream? I refuse to even consider a post-apocalyptic dystopia that goes as far as to eliminate cream, love. One must maintain some standards.”

“Cream. That’s your line in the sand?”

“Clam chowder. Oyster stew. Ice cream. Custard. Scalloped potatoes in real cream sauce. And if we make cheese, we must have high cream content if we want our bit of Stilton.”

“Not Stilton if it’s not made in Stilton, Mike.”

“Not quite true. Stilton fell just outside the appellation boundaries. Do I care?”

Greg gaped at him and pretended shock. “You’re kidding me. You're not going to fuss about appellation?"

“You can’t make an official Stilton cheese in Stilton. Now.” He gave a wicked smirk. "End-times is another matter...no bureaucracy."

“Bureaucracy,” Greg said, shaking his head. “Amazing.”

“I am nothing if not Lord of Paperwork. Amazing or not, once we’re properly post-apocalyptic we can make Stilton anywhere we like…and I do not intend to do without my wheel of blue, moldering merrily in the pantry and waiting to be eaten on cold nights with boiled new potatoes.”

“Hedonist.”

“After civilization falls, what else will there be to live for but to save culture, make love, and enjoy the pleasures of the senses?”

“Well—there is that,” Greg agreed, and pulled the car into the shaded breezeway on the road-side of the house.

He and Mycroft were in the process of deciding the correct terminology for things, here in this entirely new environment. Was the street-side of the house “the front,” or was the shore-side? They used the street-side as mere access to the house, really. The short “front yard” sloped down from the road, with more downs rising up above and inland, filled with homes and sheep herds and heather and gorse and oak groves and willow thickets, and so much that was not London. The majority of the acreage—and the estate did indeed contain acres and acres of premium priced real estate—cascaded down from the road to the sea, with the angel and demon in their own substantial property to the right as you faced the ocean—or to the left if you looked out the front door toward the road.

The breezeway stood free in front of an official garage they seldom used, except in stormy weather when they preferred to put the car out of reach of the weather. There was a hidden secondary door inset in the jog of the wall from the front to the side, and the side to the garage. That led directly to the wet room and the pantry…to which Greg and Mycroft were dragging this week’s substantial grocery load.

“So much company,” Mycroft had clucked as he tallied the final bill on the drive home. “All of ours, of course, including your sister coming out next week for the weekend with the children.”

“Hardly children, Mike—Tag’s the youngest and she’s in uni.”

“Well they’re hardly adult, yet, and the point of inviting them is to give them access to the shore. When you’re still giving people access to the shore more than to the liquor cabinet, they remain children.”

Greg grinned and promised himself he’d clue the kids in to the fact that Mycroft expected a few bottles left full when their visit was over. Really, Mike could be so naïve sometimes. Rather like that flaxen-haired/

His mind hit the brakes, as they seemed to do over and over again when considering the neighbors. He mentally stalked around the noun, that crouched in his mind like a multi-story gargoyle, all pale marble and mantling wings.

Angel.

An. Gel.

Angel.

Aziraphale was an angel.

Crowley? A demon.

The real McCoy, both of them.

Greg was a London copper. He was an undercover spy for MI5, working with the anti-terrorist department. He was seconded to MI6, to work with Sherlock and, more vitally, Mycroft, who had never given up anti-terrorist work even after his authority had spread beyond that narrow specialization.

He was not a man who easily accepted the notion of angels and demons, and to the extent he might have, angels and demons would normally have been one hypothetical premise too far. It was one thing allowing that angels and demons might be real. Another to not only know them, but to mix them up cocktails when the sun fell below the yardarm.

It had opened up an entire can of worms he had not himself particularly enjoyed having opened up. “God is an Englishman.” Well, no. According to his neighbors, it was an ineffable mystery passing as a woman this week—a woman with an American accent. “God is in his Heaven and all is right with the world.” Wrong again—God apparently had vacated Heaven thousands of years ago, and was seldom to be seen in the Heavenly precincts. As for all being right with the world?

“Do you really think so?” Aziraphale had asked, voice rising in mannerly dismay, and brows furrowing in worry. “I mean, it could be worse. It could be so very much worse. But…well. It’s hardly a matter of everything being ‘right’ is it?”

“He was disappointed in the almond croissants this morning,” Crowley quipped, sipping a Bloody Caesar around a mess of celery stalk. “Angel has standards, he does. Perfection has to live up to the mark.”

“Oh, Crowley…” The look the angel shot his lover was one part reprimand—and something approaching ten parts doting adoration. “Really. You’re quite terrible.”

“M’ a demon, me,” Crowley conceded, amiably. “Got a reputation to maintain.” And then he smiled back, and the room seemed to light.

Mike had exchanged glances with Greg and reached spontaneously over to grip hands. Mike, who even now was slow to display affection, and usually quite deliberate about it, rather than spontaneous. The angel and demon did that to Mike: melted some cold, lonely bit of reserve in his chest and gave him hope that his own love—his own adoration of Greg—was neither horrible nor doomed.

Greg found them less reassuring. They had the run-away aura of Edwardian men speaking clever, coded Polari and sashaying off to live in private little expatriate colonies in the Caribbean and the Far East, where their “peculiar tastes” could be ignored. They made him feel tetchy about his relationship with Mike, and he resented it—the angel and the demon reeking of supernatural exoticism, and of a passion that was neither crassly physical nor chastely celibate, but instead, somehow, both and neither…as though they failed to even register their interactions using the same frame of reference humans used.

But, then…if you could change your gender like your suit, and have sex without touching, and if eternity was your playground… How different would the world appear to you?

“What do you want for dinner tonight?” Mycroft asked, as he filled the refrigerator with heaps of basics: cheese and bacon and sandwich meats and eggs. Salad greens and milk. Into the freezer would go condensed juices and bags of frozen veg. They were prepared for the Days of Wrath, stocked up to the scuppers in preparation for Sherlock and Janine and John and Rosie, who went through goodies like locusts descending on the Mormon farmers or on Pharaoh’s Egypt. Crowley and Aziraphale were more helpful, often bringing entire hampers of treats as their contribution to a meal. But the human members of the household were ravening pits of unending hunger…

“Dunno,” Greg said. “Any reason not to order out?”

“Rather not,” Mycroft said, pulling a face. “Did that the other day, and it turned into a brawl. Sherlock wanted this and John wanted that and Rosie just wanted a burger and no one was listening… What about Full English for dinner, instead of brekkers?”

“I could do that. Nothing nicer than a bit of egg and fried bread, with sausage and beans and mushrooms and tomatoes to go with.”

“Then let’s go with that. I bought enough to last us days, so it’s hardly a challenge.” He leaned against the counter, and said, “Cuppa, now we’re unpacked?”

“Cuppa.” With Mycroft Greg generally drank tea. With Sherlock? Coffee. With John, beer. He was willing to adapt. Not like he didn’t like all the options…

Soon they were seated at the kitchen table, nibbling gingernuts and drinking rich assam—Mycroft took his black. Greg preferred white and sweet.

“John starts work Monday.”

“Aye. I’ve put a word in for him with the coppers in town and asked them to pass it along to the rest of the First Response community. May buy him some time if he’s a bit prickly at first.”

“Yes, and I’ve had my own conversations with the local council and the hospital administration. He’s got a bit of a safety net while he settles in. Do you think this is going to do for him? He’s never really settled. Will he settle now?”

Greg shrugged. “I don’t know. Don’t think he’s ever going to find it easy to be out of the Army.”

“But he wasn’t settled there, either—he just didn’t admit it to himself.”

“You sure of that?”

Mycroft gave him The Look, and tipped his head in comic reproach. “How long have you known me?”

“All right. All right. I’ll take your word for it. But—I don’t know if he’ll settle, Mike. I know he’s got a better chance now, and here, than I think he did back in London since Mary died. But that’s not saying much. The best he managed there was back in Baker Street with Sherlock, which is already a hell of a comment when you’re trying to raise a baby girl. But even that didn’t last. He went running after what he always runs after—a ‘bit of normal.’ He’s out for a bit of normal like you’re out for a bit of rough.” He twinkled his eyes at Mycroft, sharing the in-joke that he was his lover’s “bit of rough.”

“Not so very rough,” Mycroft said, completing the joke as he touched Greg’s hand once, softly. “But, yes. John thinks he wants normalcy, and never likes it once he’s got it. Or it fails to like him, sensing something off about him. This is different. I think he’ll do better in the EMS community. Just enough work stress for him. Near enough to visit Sherlock, far enough away to shag a willing normal if he gets the chance without having to explain his roommate. Rosie will be happy, and I think that will matter. It…looks better than anything else I’ve seen him attempt.”

“And we’ll be there to try to keep him on the straight and narrow.”

“Well. The narrow. I don’t care if he remains straight or not, myself.”

Greg grunted, a grin flickering and then gone as he registered Mycroft’s tart frustration with John’s eternal “I’m not gay,” when it seemed obvious that he was at least homo-romantic. Greg didn’t care, himself, but, “I think he’ll be happier not to have to challenge himself on that level, Mike. I’m honestly not sure brutal self-evaluation makes all lives happier.”

They were silent a bit, each thinking of their current situation. Of all the questions their little shore community was bringing up in their lives.

“My, my. Quite the old marrieds we’ve become, haven’t we?”

“Pillars of our community,” Greg conceded. He poured a new cup of tea and doctored it with milk and sugar, before grabbing a handful of new gingernuts from the package. Then, with a sigh, he allowed himself to venture where he’d not quite dared for days. “World looks a lot different than we thought it did, yeah? Angels. Demons. Gods. Apocalypse.”

“Well, yes,” Mycroft said, then with eyes laughing added, “But it’s hardly the end of the world, after all.”

Greg splorted, just barely avoiding spraying the table with tea. “You bastard,” he grumbled, mopping up spillage. “And this was a new t-shirt this morning.”

“The day’s cooling off,” Mycroft said, mild as a vanilla custard, barring a wicked little grin hidden in the turn of his mouth. “Changing won’t hurt you.”

The words resonated, somehow, humming through the comfortable country kitchen, crackling off the boundaries of Greg’s mind.

Changing…

They were changing. Just over a week ago they’d had no plan to leave London, much less live down here in the big house above Sherlock’s chosen cottage. Nor would Greg have bet even a popped button on Sherlock enduring the idea of Big Brother and Brother-in-Law living on the same estate, just up the hill. As for him marrying that sweet, wicked mad girl Janine? No! And refusing to let John fall back on “easy but wrong,” and move himself and Rosie into the cottage to play sullen third wheel and cockblock as surely as Sherlock himself had ever cockblocked John?  
  
And that wasn’t even beginning to take angels and demons and God into account. Gay-ish angels and demons at that. Gay-ish sex-morphing angels and demons who fucked with a passion and tenderness that had actually set Greg’s own bar higher and forced him to ask himself how much he gave his lover.

“The world nearly ended,” he said, softly. “And us never the wiser.”

“Yes,” Mycroft said.

“We’d have died. Badly. With no warning and nothing we could do to stop it.”

“Yes.”

“There’s a God—and he…she…wouldn’t have lifted a finger to stop it. May have been the one to set it into motion.”

“Or, conversely, may have been the one cheering Crowley and Aziraphale and their odd team on.”

“There is that,” Greg admitted. He sighed. “Ineffable. I could get to hate that word.”

“I…rather like it.”

“You’ve checked them all out since the neighbors filled you in? Had your people check out the lot of them?”

“Quite.”

“Are they…”

“Remarkably decent lot, as human beings go. And hardly tied in to international powers. I doubt that the Russians are going to put them to use in any nefarious scheme.”

“That’s good to know.” Greg was quiet for a bit, then said. “Do you…really think this Adam is ‘human’ now?”

Mycroft considered, sipping delicately at his tea. After thought, he said, “For a certain value of ‘human?’ Yes. But really? When all is reckoned? No. If he were really human, his Satanic father would be in a position to reset his parentage and get it all under way again. I would say he’s both, myself. Fully human. Fully demonic. Fully angelic, even. Perhaps even Godly. I’m not in a position to know or understand. I suspect it’s all as top-secret ineffable as it gets. Need-to-know stuff. But he has to retain his powers enough to continue to revoke his powers, if that makes sense. He is the dark and the light combined.”

Greg grunted, and thought of a demon and an angel in love—the yin and the yang of them. Of humankind, so mixed in their virtues and their vices. Of a God who seemed to reside in neither Heaven nor Hell—and who seemed to want a world where people could make free will choices. After a time he felt the darkness that had been weighing him down lift, and he smiled, and nodded at Mycroft. “Well,” he said, letting himself fall into relaxed street Estuary, less formal than he’d have used in the office back in the day. “Well then. That’ll do, won’t it?”

“I suspect it will,” Mycroft said, smiling back. “It’s an hour or two before we have to start prepping dinner, and the house is quiet. Would you like to come upstairs with me, love?” His eyes invited Greg to tender pleasures.

Greg smiled, thinking of a demon lying in her angel’s arms, enraptured. “Might as well,” he said, his voice taking the sting out of the phrased indifference. He smiled and rose, and took his lover’s hand, and they spent the next few hours proving to themselves that the world was hardly ending.


End file.
